Does Wikipedia Really Matter?

[HRIP7]

simsa0's wordpress: Does Wikipedia Really Matter?

This was the question on a forum-thread at Wikipediocracy and I found it a rather neat way to summarize some of my opinions on Wikipedia.

To state it bluntly in advance, I think the answer is “no”.

With this I don’t mean to belittle the work of thousands of volunteers (and of some paid Wikimedia staff too) who still have the stamina to go through the endless procedures of clarifying problems and cleaning up messes. Despite the recent turmoil over “sexist categorization” [1] and revenge-editing [2], I am not sure how much of this is a structural problem or mainly the result of an abuse of possibilities existing editing policies didn’t effectively ruled out. But whatever it may be, those problems should be seen in connection with the vast amount of articles in many language versions that managed to not stir up trouble so far.

Having said that, I want to enumerate five aspects that jointly show or even contribute to Wikipedia’s decline. They are not five distinct areas in which Wikipedia loses importance, but features that jointly contribute to its diminishing relevance.

[DanMurphy]

The discussion here that inspired that post.

[EricBarbour]

But with data-mining, semantic web, big data, automated text-processing, and developments in automated text-generation, there will be search- and editing-software in the near future that will crawl the web to find the most relevant information relative to a given search query. The queries will pull together information from a myriad of sources, all distributed and no longer confined to one site. In the near future, knowledge will no longer be laid down in form of articles. Rather, those articles will be written ad hoc as people proceed from one query to the next. Given this development, Wikipedia stands at the end of an era of media history, not at the beginning, as it is still structured like a printed book, not like a chatter on the marketplace. Search- and editing-algorithms will circumvent and replace Wikipedia’s static features of article and lemmata in a few years time.

If there is something on the web to search for, especially in an obscure subject area.

[Poetlister]

If a program trawls the Internet and synthesises an article, the result will often be a worse mess than anything the Wikipedia community could throw up. The referencing will be non-existent and some really very dubious sites will be used.